About: Sonal Kadchha

My name is Sonal Kadchha. I’m an integrative therapist, charity founder and ex-city professional. I’m passionate about equality issues, the therapeutic potential of psychedelics and vipassana meditation. When I ‘connect the dots’ in my own life story and work, I see three themes emerging:

  • Growing up as a first generation British Asian, I often felt ‘torn between two cultures’. After graduating in Chemical Engineering from Cambridge, I went on to work in financial services, holding a number of leadership positions in the UK, Asia & Africa.  In order to give similar opportunities to those less fortunate, I founded a charity called ETC, which has been educating thousands of young women in East Africa for over a decade now. It is helping them break away from a life of poverty, FGM and childhood marriage. They have a choice of how they want to live. This theme also guides my work with counselling clients – to break away from the internalised ‘shoulds’ of society/family/culture and access that authentic inner voice so that they can choose what they want for themselves. It’s not about rejecting one voice for the other but the inner freedom to choose.

  • Education ultimately helped me to empower myself. This is also my vision for ETC – empowerment through education to create ‘external’ equality. But ‘equality’ needs to be internalised too - you need to feel worthy of it. Equality isn’t about ‘being the same’ as everyone else but about ‘being ourselves’, being accepted in our difference and uniqueness. My counselling work is about facilitating this journey from self-awareness to self-acceptance to self-love by helping clients reconnect to that authentic inner voice. I do this by standing alongside them to facilitate self empowerment rather than directing them .

  • Once you’ve dissolved those barriers, you need to courageously move in the direction of that authentic inner voice! During my time in the corporate world, I suffered from a constant sense of unease based on an ineffable feeling that something wasn’t ‘quite right’. I would get temporary highs from promotions, bonuses and travel but that sense of unease would eventually return. I even started my own charity in an attempt to alleviate that unease & emptiness. However, even though it still does this, it didn’t help solve my symptoms because I wasn’t addressing what was going on from the inside out - unconscious inner conflicts from childhood which are fundamentally systemic in today’s society. It was only when I embarked on that inner journey was I truly able to heal by reconnecting with that authentic inner voice. It guided me to the work that I am doing today – a journey from survival to healing to authentic service.

As seen in:

Experience

In my private practice I work with professionals suffering from anxiety, depression, burn-out and (midlife) crisis. I also work with people who are working through transitions or trying to make sense of other types of crisis e.g. spiritual emergencies, intense psychedelic experiences, sudden loss (job, relationships, loved ones etc) or on the brink of change (e.g. promotion, other shifts in ‘identity’, circumstances, countries). I work as a ‘spaceholder’ for PsyCare UK and the Medicine Festival. I’ve also trained with the Spiritual Crisis Network (SCN). I have worked with Cruse Bereavement Services UK and the Psychosynthesis Trust’s counselling service.

Qualifications & Affiliations

  • Masters in Psychosynthesis Psychology [distinction] - Institute of Psychosynthesis in affiliation with Middlesex University.

  • Awarded the Emma Stavrou Thesis Award 'for a thesis which advances academic principles and clinical insight in Psychosynthesis'. My thesis was on ‘How Psychosynthesis can provide a psycho-spiritual context and framework for challenging psychedelic experiences’.

  • Diploma in Counselling [level 4] - Institute of Psychosynthesis

  • Post Graduate Diploma in Psychotherapy [in progress] - Institute of Psychosynthesis (accredited by UKCP)

  • Bereavement Support Foundation [level 2, including CPDs in COVID-19 deaths, suicide prevention & control] - Cruse Bereavement Support (awarded through Ascentis)

  • Foundations of Jungian Analytical Psychology - Society of Analytical Psychology

  • MEng, BEng in Chemical Engineering [first class with honours] - Queens’ College, University of Cambridge

  • Registered member of the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists (BACP) and as such, subscribe to the  BACP Code of Ethics

  • Professional Liability Insurance held with Holistic Insurance Services